Monday, January 21, 2013

Last night’s movie was an
Italian psychological thriller with horror overtones, released in the U.S. as Submission
of a Woman — though that’s not a literal translation of the original Italian
title, Al Calar della Sera, which has proven surprisingly difficult to dope out on the Internet.
The dictionary.reverso.net Web site defines the Italian verb calare as “to lower, decrease, drop,” and gives such
examples of its use as calare il sipario (“lower the curtain”), il prezzo della benzina è calato (“the price of gas has gone down”), al calar
della sole (“at sunset”) and al
calar della luna (“when the moon has gone
down”). Sera simply means “evening” —
I’ve always been amused by the name of one of Italy’s most prestigious
newspapers, the Corriere della Sera, which sounds impressive but simply means “evening paper.” Ironically,
the Web also gave me a Spanish meaning for calar — “to soak through, pierce, penetrate” — which actually seems more apropos to this movie than the Italian word because it is
literally a film about rape. It opens with an unknown woman being menaced by a
mystery man, identified in the dramatis personae only as lo psicopatico — “The Psychopath” (Paolo Lorimer) — who fondles
her breasts, then takes a hunting knife to her and rubs it over her skin, then
stabs her with it, though writer-director Alessandro Lucidi is decorous enough
that he doesn’t actually show the knife puncture the skin; we simply see the
woman’s facial expression change from terror to searing pain, we hear her cry
out, and then Lucidi cuts to the blood from the wound dripping on her floor.

Then we meet the film’s heroine, Luisa (Daniela Poggi), who’s being menaced by
a character clad as a vampire who’s left the obligatory two puncture marks on
her neck — only, in a gimmick that was probably pioneered by Victor
Schertzinger in the 1937 musical Something to Sing About but is still appealing, the camera pulls back and
we see that we’re on a film set, with an announcer declaiming that
such-and-such a brand of sticking plaster will cover and help heal any wounds. Luisa is an actress who has achieved a
reputation for sexy commercials, but now she’s married a rich man, Giorgio
(Gianluca Favilla), and she doesn’t have to work — she was only doing this one
last commercial as a favor to its director, an old friend, but she’s decided to
stop displaying her underwear and bras on TV. She lives in a large house in the
country with her husband and their baby daughter Francesca (Cecilia Luci —
she’s identified only as la bambina, “the baby girl,” on the film’s imdb.com page), only their neighborhood
is being menaced by the mystery man and Luisa herself has been receiving
hang-up phone calls from him. That evening she and her husband are planning
what one of the subtitles refers to as “the climbing” — were they planning an
evening workout on one of those faux mountainsides inside a gym that are supposed to enable you to practice
rock climbing? — and then a dinner out, and for that purpose they’ve called a
babysitter, Paola (Anna Orso), to watch Francesca and work the night for them.
Only, wouldn’t you know it, after about 45 minutes of slow, disquieting buildup
lo psicopatico crashes their property,
kills Giorgio (the synopsis on the DVD box says he’s only “beaten to a pulp”
but it’s pretty clear in the actual movie that he dies; it’s also likely that
the blurb writer never actually saw the movie, since the blurbist says that
Luisa and Paola are forced to watch Giorgio get beaten, but in fact the psycho
kills Giorgio outside the house, while he’s out of Luisa’s eyeshot or earshot,
and before Paola arrives at all) and menaces Luisa, whose only precaution is to
dissolve a sleeping pill in baby Francesca’s drink and hide her in a closet so
hopefully she’ll sleep through the whole thing.

The man forces Luisa to have
sex with him — though once again Lucidi is subtle about this; instead of
showing an out-and-out rape he simply has Luisa instructed to fondle the man’s
crotch, and we don’t get to see dick (darn! As vicious a character as Paolo
Lorimer is supposed to be playing, and as oddly as he’s made up — the
filmmakers seem to have wanted his face to be as white as possible to make him
look especially sinister — his basket looks hot enough that a lot of straight
women and Gay men in the audience were probably thinking, “He wouldn’t have to
rape me!”) — and when Paola
arrives he makes Luisa tie her up. Then, after Luisa has been (im)properly
humiliated and subjugated, she gets to turn the tables by drenching the man in
kerosene, then getting a box of matches and threatening to set him on fire. She
and Paola then have a debate over what to do with him — Paola wants to call the
police and have him arrested, while Luisa, distrustful of the court system and
sounding like the assembled criminals in M as they mock that film’s psychopath’s plea that he can’t help himself,
wants to kill him then and there and is about to do so when the sleeping drug
she gave baby Francesca wears off and the kid starts crying. Luisa goes
upstairs to the closet to tend to her daughter, and while she’s gone the man
manages to regain control of the situation and escape. Luisa sets off after him
in her car — there’s a great moment of suspense as to whether the thing will
start since she’s been having trouble with it earlier — and ultimately sees a
man walking around in the dark and runs him over. I was wondering if he was
going to turn out to be an innocent bystander Luisa merely mistook for the psycho — who in the meantime had been
shown in extreme close-ups focused on his eyes, which had led my viewing
companion to think that he was actually in her back seat, just waiting to
strike — but no-o-o-o-o, he’s
apparently the real deal, and when Luisa recognizes him as such she
deliberately drives her car over him just to make sure she kills him. The End.

Submission
of a Woman is the sort of story one
would expect to see on Lifetime in the U.S. — the DVD box blurb writer
describes it as “a late entry in the infamous Italo ‘rape & revenge’ canon”
— but the Italian version is different from the putative American one mainly in
that it’s a good deal slower and more atmospheric than a U.S. (or Canadian)
director would have made it. In its genre category on imdb.com it’s listed as
“horror” as well as “thriller,” and indeed the cold-dark-night setting and the
heavy-duty atmospherics and general air of doom indicate that writer-director
Lucidi was going as much for the horror tropes as the thriller ones. It’s also
different from an American “take” on this story in that it has so few people in
it — there aren’t the elaborate introductions of everyone else important in
Luisa’s life we’d have got in a Lifetime movie with this premise — and in
keeping Luisa’s revenge private instead of involving the police, either to save
her or to investigate her afterwards as a murderess. Submission of a Woman is a deceptive title — one would expect an S/M
tale in which a woman is attacked by a sexual assailant but decides midway
through that she likes what he’s doing to her and ends up in thrall to him as
his sex slave — but it’s a good film even though sometimes it gets a bit too slow and atmospheric for its own good.